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Skills

A skill is one procedure the agent knows how to run, written down in one file. The agent finds a skill by its name, not by which folder it sits in.

Where you see it​

Skills are invisible plumbing. The owner never opens a skill file to use it. They say "run the morning check-in" or "post this week's events," and the agent picks the matching skill.

Sometimes the agent brings one up first: "That sounds like a job that should run every Monday. Want me to set it up properly?" That is a built-in skill at work.

What happens, step by step​

  1. The owner says: "Run the end-of-week wrap-up."
  2. The vault's routing map says a procedure lives in the skills bucket.
  3. The skills index matches the request to a skill by what it does.
  4. The agent finds the file by its name. It searches every skill file for a top line that says name: end-of-week-wrap-up, in any subfolder.
  5. It opens the file and follows the steps.
  6. If the search finds nothing, it tries spelling variants and checks the index before it ever says "that skill does not exist."

What powers it​

PartWhat it does
One .md file per skillHolds the steps. A name: and a description: sit at the top.
description: lineThe words the agent matches a request against.
The skills indexOne file that matches a task to a skill by purpose.
The name lookupThe agent searches every skill file, in every subfolder, for the one whose name matches.
The built-in skillsFive skills kept where they load in every session, so the agent can offer them unasked.

Why it works this way​

Many skills live in subfolders grouped by topic. A quick look at the top folder misses most of them.

That caused a real failure. The owner asked the box to run a morning skill. The box looked at the top folder, saw nothing, and said "no such skill exists." The skill was sitting one folder down the whole time. Since then there are two rules: find a skill by its name, and never call one missing until that name search comes back empty.

The built-in skills

A handful of skills load into every session, so the agent can offer them before the owner knows to ask.

Most skills wait to be asked for by name. A few are different. They sit in a special folder that the agent reads at the start of every session. That means the agent always knows they exist and can say "there is a proper way to do this."

They cover the jobs the owner would never know to ask for by name:

  • Building a routine that runs on a clock, like "check this every morning."
  • Building a routine that reacts to an event, like "tell me the moment a form comes in."
  • Hiring a resident agent, one that holds a goal for weeks.
  • Connecting a new service, or getting past a site that blocks the agent.
  • Standing up a new website.

Each one also has a one-line pointer in the skills index, so a search finds it there too.

Product skills vs the owner's own skills​

There are two shelves, and they are easy to mix up.

  • Product skills sit in the install kit. Every client box gets all of them. So nothing on this shelf may assume one owner's accounts, history, or habits.
  • The owner's own skills sit in the vault's skills folder. These are about one person's life and business. A client never receives them.

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